It's time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.
A friend recently visited Missouri, and informed me that an important thing to know (particularly if you have a tour booked) is that access to the ship is rather complicated. You park in a remote lot, then take a bus to the ship, and the bus runs every 15 minutes. So if you are planning a visit and want to take the (very well-priced) engineering tour, show up early.
Overhauls are my reviews of Charleston Navy Yard and Battleship Cove, A Brief Overview of the United States Fleet, Lasers at Sea Parts two and three and for 2023, Military Spaceflight Parts five and six.
Comments
Marine Sealift Command has announced a "force generation reset"[1], which involves taking crews off of:
2 T-AKEs (out of 14 currently in service)
1 Henry J. Kaiser-class T-AO (out of 14 currently in service). These are already in the process of being replaced by John Lewis-class T-AOs, with 3 of that class in service so far.
12 Spearhead-class T-EPFs (formerly JHSV), which I believe is all of the active T-EPFs in the MSC ship inventory?
2 ESBs, both of which were are currently forward-deployed with combatant commands.
I have no real opinion on the T-AKEs or T-AOs.
Moving the T-EPFs to an inactive status makes complete sense - they have essentially no mission to fulfill, so the Navy loses very little capability. At the same time, they are still paying Austal to build even more? USNS Cody was just delivered this year, and then there are two more "vanilla" EPFs under construction, to be followed by 3 brand new "T-EMS" variants. Is no one able to hit the emergency stop button on this program? I understand that both the Navy and Sen. Shelby wanted to keep Austal's yard in business, but they've retooled for steel ships now and have a huge order of 11 cutters to build for the Coast Guard. They would be fine, and their resources could be focused on much more useful things.
The ESBs make even less sense to me - the Navy has found these platforms valuable enough to commission them as warships, and they're paying NASSCO more than ~$600m per ship to build 2 more. My only guess here is that it's one of three situations:
A "Washington monument strategy", where MSC is strategically removing crew from an in-use asset, so that the combatant commanders will complain up the chain and MSC can possibly get the changes implemented that would allow them to better retain crew (mostly leave and pay that is more comparable to the commercial sector)
Someone (not sure whether it would be the Navy side or MSC side) wants to end the "hybrid crew" model of the ESBs, and hand it entirely over to the Navy to operate.
The combatant commanders actually don't find the ESBs to be that valuable, or worth the manpower.
[1] https://news.usni.org/2024/08/22/navy-could-sideline-17-support-ships-due-to-manpower-issues
@Alex: we previously discussed the usefulness of ESBs (i.e. very cheap but basically defenseless helicopter carriers) here, but without reaching any clear conclusion.
Yeah, they are oddballs, so I can see both sides there.
But regardless of whether you think they are useful, it's difficulty to construct an argument for taking the crews off existing ones at the same time as you are spending billions to buy more.
I suspect that it's a combination of culling useless assets (the EPFs) and trying to get more money out of Congress (the rest). With the obvious position of finding a compromise that leaves everyone in decent shape.
Sadly, I don't think there is. We really should look at installing that one of these days.
This might be mentioned somewhere in the engines series, but how did the evolution from "widely spaced 4 funnels" to "single trunked stack" go?
I'm assuming a lot of it was better machinery allowing tighter spaced boiler rooms, but were there also improvements in exhaust trunking that allowed it?
Re. The other discussion, is there an overall shortage of ~qualified~ certified civilian mariners in the US now? Crewing shortages are routine in every organization I've heard from.
Callous treatment by management (HR) in '20-'21 sounds like a common factor that was especially bad in this case. Sitting in port imprisoned onboard for months on end for literally no reason while "contractors" came and went freely is the most morale-destroying thing I can imagine.
The ESB discussion from last time looks a bit different in a world where even "some guys in a desert gang" can sink civilian tankers.
The floor of "low threat environment" is being raised fast, to the point that the "combat" use of an ESB would be limited to bombarding a totally disarmed civilian population. As one of those populations I'm not thrilled with the idea.
Still potentially useful if constantly guarded, but do you really want to risk headlines like "Chinese-backed Bolognasian separatists sink US carrier for 2nd time in 2038"?